Lewis P. Simpson
LIONEL TRILLING AND THE AGENCY
OF TERROR
My subject is a large and difficult one, Lionel Trilling's
quest for vocation .
If
my remarks on it seem to bear an informal,
even at times a personal quality, this is owing to two circumstances.
One is that, although I did not know Trilling personally, for close to
forty years he has been a part of my life as a teacher, historian, and
editor in the field of American letters. The other circumstance is that
I did know Trilling's older contemporary, Allen Tate (1889-1979),
with whom I shall seek to bring Trilling (1905-1975) into a certain
degree of relationship. Assuming the privilege of personal interest, I
should add, I will not consider the whole Trilling canon; omitting
the famous study of Matthew Arnold (1939), my concern will be
with the books that came in the 1950s and after. My sense of obli–
gation to Trilling goes back to the time when, following my com–
pletion of the tedious and lengthy process of intimidation called get–
ting a Ph.D., I began, though always to be confined to the campus,
to try to get an education I might certify as my own. The books I
think of most particularly are:
The Liberal Imagination
(1950);
The Op–
posing Self
(1955);
Beyond Culture
(1965);
Sincerity and Authenticity
(the
Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1970, published in 1972); and
Mind
in the Modern World
(the inaugural Jefferson Lecture of the National
Endowment for the Humanities in 1972, published in pamphlet
form the same year). But I shall here refer in any detail only to
The Liberal Imagination
and
The Opposing Self.
My orienting, if not
altogether major, emphasis will be on a work by Trilling not until
recently known publicly, the selection from his notebooks for the
years 1927-1951, as compiled by Christopher Zinn and published in
the fiftieth anniversary issue of
Partisan Review
(Vol.
LI,
#4, 1984) .
So far as I am aware I attribute a larger significance to the notebooks
than other students of Trilling.
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as a lecture at the
Uni~ersity
of South–
western Louisiana on April 24, 1986, in honor of Professor Milton H . Rickels on the
occasion of his retirement from the English faculty, under the auspices of the Flora
M. Levy Endowment of the University.
